Try something fun and see if you can put the periodic table elements in order.
In this game - linked here - you're presented four element names, and you're supposed to click on the element that comes next on the periodic table.
For example, you'll start with four options and should choose Hydrogen because that's the first element on the table. From there, you just choose which of the four presented elements comes next.
I've only played it once, and I got knocked out at #62 - which made me kind of sad, I'll have to admit.
(And please don't buy the linked NFTs of the elements. NFTs are dumb.)
I actually remember the story of the Bhopal accident appearing on the news when I was a child. I would've been about 9 1/2 years old at the time.
There's nothing but tragedy in today's story, an industrial accident in Bhopal, India where a Union Carbide plant producing two pesticides had a huge leak leading to more likely more than ten thousand immediate deaths.
There's not a huge amount of direct chemistry in today's video - in spite of a couple of chemical structures being shown - but there is something I want to say.
(Warning...heavy soapbox moment here...feel free to skip this if you don't want to hear Mr Dusch's very heavy handed opinion.)
We can never have enough corporate oversight by government inspectors.
There are people who will tell you that corporations can police themselves, that they will always take care of safety because it's their people who are in danger.
That's an absolute lie.
Corporations are concerned about profits over everything else. That's it. That's all.
Every corporation lobbying to cut regulations on their production control, every corporation arguing that safety constraints are hurting their business, every corporation trying to cut environmental laws because it hurts their business is putting your life at risk.
They don't care about your life or mine.
They care about profit.
(Oh, and happy fiftieth birthday to me today. I probably should have chosen something a little more happy and light-hearted for today's topic.)
I assume that the full NatGeo documentary goes on to explain what happened near Lake Nyos that day, but the clip I embedded above - the only one I found from NatGeo on YouTube - cuts off before an explanation.
I'll let you make a guess as to what caused all the deaths before you click through to more detailed videos after the jump.
Let's be honest, we should all be more skeptical about videos that we see online.
Yes, there are some really cool videos online. Some of them are real, honest videos of things that actually happened.
Others, however, are bullpucky like the above video of a young woman supposedly pouring boiling water out of an electric kettle and the water freezing into a free-standing spiral before it hits the ground.
This is mocking - or maybe just playing off of a real effect in which boiling water - if thrown into ridiculously cold (like -30 F) air - can freeze before hitting the ground. It does require the water to be nearly aerosolized into really tiny droplets, drastically increasing the surface area allowing for much faster cooling...more on that tomorrow (ooh, a teaser!)
As I said, we should be skeptical. I don't know, however, that we all need to take that skepticism to such mathematical, analytical depths to publicly debunk such videos.
The space cup works with surface tension to keep the liquid in the cup and allow astronauts to drink from an open container rather than from a straw attached to a baggie of liquid.
